In November 1897, in a field near the village of Coligny in eastern France, a local inhabitant unearthed two strange objects.

One was an imposing statue of Mars, the Roman god of war. The other was an ancient bronze tablet, 5 feet wide and 3.5 feet high. It bore numerals in Roman but the words were in Gaulish, the extinct version of Celtic spoken by the inhabitants of France before the Roman conquest in the first century B.C.

The tablet, now known as the Coligny calendar, turned out to record the Celtic system of measuring time, as well as being one of the most important sources of Gaulish words.

Two researchers, Dr. Peter Forster of the University of Cambridge in England and Dr. Alfred Toth of the University of Zurich, have now used the calendar and other Celtic inscriptions to reconstruct the history of Celtic and its position in the Indo-European family of languages.

They say that Celtic became a distinct language and entered the British Isles much earlier than supposed.

Though the Gauls were strong enough to sack Rome in 390 B.C., eventually the empire struck back. The Romans defeated the Celts, both in France and in Britain, so decisively that Latin and its successor languages displaced Celtic over much of its former territory. In the British Isles, Celtic speakers survived in two main groups: the Goidelic branch of Celtic, which includes Irish and Scots Gaelic, and the Brythonic branch, formed of Welsh and Breton, a Celtic tongue carried to Brittany in France by emigrants from Cornwall.

Because languages change so fast, historical linguists distrust language trees that go back more than a few thousand years. Dr. Forster, a geneticist, has developed a new method for relating a group of languages, basing it on the tree-drawing techniques used to trace the evolutionary relationships among genes. His method works on just a handful of words, a fortunate circumstance since only some 30 Gaulish words have known counterparts in all the other languages under study.

Dr. Forster and his linguist colleague Dr. Toth have used the method to draw up a tree relating the various branches of Celtic to one another and to other Indo-European languages like English, French, Spanish, Latin and Greek. In an article in today's issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they say that soon after the ancestral Indo-European language arrived in Europe it split into different branches leading to Celtic, Latin, Greek and English.

Within Celtic, their tree shows that Gaulish  the continental version of the language  separated from its Goidelic and Brythonic cousins, much as might be expected from the facts of geography.

The researchers' method even dates the fork points in their language tree, although the dates have a wide range of possibility. The initial splitting of Indo-European in Europe occurred around 8100 B.C., give or take 1,900 years, and the divergence between the continental and British versions of Gaelic took place in 3200 B.C., plus or minus 1,500 years, they calculate.

These dates are much earlier than previously estimated. "The traditional date of the Indo-European family has been 4000 BC for some time," Dr. Merritt Ruhlen of Stanford University said. Dr. Ruhlen said the new method "seems pretty reasonable" and should be useful in tracing back the earlier history of the Indo-European language.

Specialists have long debated which country was the homeland of the Indo-Europeans and whether their language was spread by conquest or because its speakers were the first farmers whose methods and tongue were adopted by other populations. The second theory, that of spread by agriculture, has been advocated by Dr. Colin Renfrew, a Cambridge archaeologist.

Dr. Forster, who works in Dr. Renfrew's institute, said in an interview that the suggested date 8100 B.C. for the arrival of Indo-European in Europe "does seem to vindicate Renfrew's archaeological idea that the Indo-European languages were spread by farmers."

Agriculture started to arrive in Europe from the Near East around 6000 B.C., much earlier than the traditional date proposed by linguists for the spread of Indo-European. This timing would fit with the lower end of Dr. Forster's range of dates.

Dr. Forster said that his estimated date of 3200 B.C. for the arrival of Celtic speakers in England and Ireland was also much earlier than the usual date, 600 B.C., posited on the basis of archaeological evidence.

Dr. Forster said his method of comparing groups of languages was unfamiliar to historical linguists, many of whom study how words in a single language have changed over time. Asked what linguists thought of his method he said: "To be honest, they don't understand it, most of them. They don't even know what I'm talking about."

The method has two parts. One is to draw a tree on the basis of carefully chosen words; the second is to date the splits in the tree by calibrating them with known historical events. This is similar to the way geneticists date their evolutionary trees by tying one or more branch points to known dates from the fossil record.

Dr. April McMahon, a linguist at the University of Sheffield in England, said that Dr. Forster's method "seems to me to be a good start" and that it was reasonable to base a language family tree on just a handful of well-chosen words. She had less confidence in the dating method, she said, because language changes in an irregular way based on social factors like the size of the speaker's group and its degree of contact with others.

Geneticists often assume that the rate of mutation will average out over time, so that if one or two branch points in a tree can be dated by fossil evidence, the timing of the other branch points can be inferred.

Dr. Forster says he assumes that the rate of language change can also be averaged over time. But Dr. McMahon says she thinks that historical time, being much shorter than evolutionary time, is less friendly to averaging and that linguists should not even try, at least yet, to put dates on language trees.

Forster's area of expertise is genetics... and gene tree charts are an effective tool in that discipline. I do not know whether it is as effective in linguistics. That remains to be seen... and it might turn out to be very useful. However, it strikes me that Forster's expertise in genetics necessarily limits his expertise in linguistics. Both disciplines require completely differing fields of in depth study and it would be surprising if Forster could be expert in both fields.

On the other hand, interdisciplinary fusions of techniques and knowledge may result in completely new (and accurate) insights or uncover relationships that were heretofor unsuspected.

Words do not necessarily follow peoples... words can precede them. A trader from a people who do not use a word MAY bring it back from a trade expedition. The word may become popular and become adopted into the local language. Captives and slaves bring words and customs with them when they are sold, often at some distance from their roots.

There is also the problem that some words derive from common noises made by babies... mama, dada are prime examples... to assume that unrelated cultures are related based on such words would be falacious.

Sometimes words are coined in one culture and then provide a needed usage in another culture that lacked both the word and the concept. It is my understanding that the Japanese word for "Thank you," "Obrigato" is a transplant from the Portuguese "Obligato." Japanese culture did not include the concept of thanks... it was based on expected class oriented duties and privileges which not require any thanks... it was merely accepted as due. Interaction with a differing culture required a word for "thanks" and an already existing, foreign word was adopted. To then confabulate a familial relationship between Portuguese and Japanese would be erroneous.

As a matter of fact, in Ireland, where a lot of our Halloween rituals come from, hollowed out turnips with candles in them were used in place of pumpkins.

The heads taken by Celtic warriors were battle trophies and religious offerings.

Various ancient warrior people from Scythians to Aztecs took the heads of their enemies and used them as trophies.

Personally, I admire the Jivaro custom of producing Tsan-Tsans or shrunken heads from their dead enemies. That way you could hang them on the rear view mirror of your car - they take up less room than the entire skull.

The article raises an interesting point: most people assume that languages spread by conquest, but that doesn't seem to hold so well. The Romans conquered the Greeks, but the Greeks still speak Greek and probably more Romans learned Greek than Greeks learned Latin. Likewise, the Gauls maintained their language for centuries after Caesar's conquest, but lost it after they successfully conquered back territory. The Germanic Franks conquered Romanized Gaul, but wound up speaking a language more Roman than German.

There are differences in each 'example' you raise -- The Greeks -- the Romans admired the Greeks and held them to be the founts of Culture, so the GReek language held sway as it was considered the language of culture.The same thing happened for hte Franks and the Normans.Int he case of hte Gauls, the Roman culture was more advanced so was adopted. Also, it was the language of Empire, of commerce and even more so, because Caesar carried out what was practically a genocide of the Gauls in the years 55 to 44 BC.

The blind poet Homer pretty well covered the destruction of the Milesian colony at Illium (Allium) by the more primitive Greeks. That Scythians adopted Celtic culture, weapons and words is beyond dispute

Helloo. Greeks more primitive than Celts????? When was this? Or are you talking aobut Doric Greeks who smashed the Mycenean civilisation in 1200 BC?

Accorind got Irish Myths, the Emerald Isle was conquered by 5 (?) groups of invading people. The 3rd were the Fir Bolgs (probabaly the Celtic Belgae), the 4th were hte Tuatha de Danaan(the tribes of Dana) and the 5th were the Milesians, the sons of some Mil dude supposedly from Spain.

When did the Celts ever conque territory back from the Romans? Rome fell to invading Germainc barbarians,not to Celtic invasions.

Ooh,, this is fast becoming my favourite piece of knowledge to disseminate. Seems that the term German is taken from the Latin word Germanus meaning authentic or genuine. The distinction between Germans and Celts in terms of physical structure is non-existant and the differentiation was givent ot hem by the Romans. tHe Romans considered the Germans to be the genuine Celts while those in the West were mixed with other tribes...

all evidence indicates the Celts originated in central Europe, in what is now Austria and neighboring areas. They then spread south into north Italy (Cisapline Gaul, west into Switzerland and Gaul, southwest into northern Spain (the Celt-Iberians) and across the English Channel or Bay of Biscay into the British Isles. Another group spread south and east into Anatolia (see the Galatians in the Bible) and even as far as Egypt where they served as mercenaries

I concur. Also, about the relation between the languages, the Germanics/Italics/Celtics may have been originally one group before splitting with the GErmans giving rise to the Celts or vice versa. I do find similarities between German and Latin (but htat may be due to the influence of the latter on the former), but Polish is completely different.

The Carthaginians never sacked Rome - though Hannibal certainly tried very hard. The Carthaginian language (Punic) was eliminated in Africa by eliminating its speakers through genocide (and a well-deserved genocide it was),

And pray tell, why was it a well deserved genocide? The Phoenicians were respected by the GReeks and Romans as great traders, maritime adventurers and the only one of the ancients who traversed beyond hte pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar and Jabl al whatever on the other side inMorocco).

The phoenician alphabet is the first phonetic alphabet in the world and the Greek alphabet is derived from the phoneician. How was it good to have slaughtered these wise ancients?

Most of the barbarian invaders were seeking incorporation into the empire, not the destruction of the empire. Charlemagne himself had himself crowned a Roman Emperor. you're combining 400 years in one sentence. THe early German barbarians wanted the riches of the Roman lands and conquered them. They then realised that this was a superior culture they captured (like hte Romans capturing Greece said 'Captive Greece encaptivated Rome', but even more so) and became completely Roman. Rome did not become Germanicized as the Germans had nothign culturally to offer Rome. The Germans became Romanized whether within or without hte Empire. Modern Western civilisation is nearly exclusively Roman with Christian morals.

ARe you sure? Ancient Irani (Avestan) related to Slavic and Baltic languages)? But Avestan is very similar to Sanskrit, almost brother dialects in a way. I don't think the Slavic language is so closely related to these two more highly evolved Aryanic languages.

of course in a broader sense they are related, but on what basis do you say that the Slavic language is comparatively closer to Sanskrit-Avestan than German or Latin? I'd think the opposite was true.

English is a Germanic language, with heavy influence from French (a Romance language, based on Latin).

It's very Latinate, not just from the French influence but from legal, medical, and scientific terms which since the Renaissance and the abandonment of the direct use of the Latin language have been creeping into common use. What happened in English which didn't happen to the same degree elsewhere in the Germanic community is that commonly-used Latin words were slightly anglicized but otherwise incorporated untranslated. ("Paternitas" became "paternity," etc.)

Pick up a dictionary and sample the derivations. Latin is very heavily represented now. It's probably the single most common source of word roots although the core vocabulary of the language is Germanic.

Actually Rome did not fall until the 1400s when the city of Byzantium and it's environs were seized by the Turks (who were, by that time, quite civilized themselves, or things would have been much, much worse).

The Constantinople that fell to the Turks in 1453 had indeed been the capital of Constantine, but it had already fallen once in the Fourth Crusade. There was no Byzantine ("Roman") Empire for almost 60 years, 1204 to 1261, the duration of something called the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople. Continuity was lost there. 1204 should probably be marked as the disappearance of the last remaining real shreds of the Roman Empire.

Yes, that nation still in 1453 called itself the Roman Empire. Nevertheless it was a small, uniformly Greek-speaking kingdom, no empire at all. It had lost the last shreds of empire centuries earlier. Nor was it the last kingdom to style itself the Roman Empire. Attempted revivals include the Holy Roman Empire and Napoleon crowning himself as Roman Emperor as late as 1800.

The Carthaginian language (Punic) was eliminated in Africa by eliminating its speakers through genocide (and a well-deserved genocide it was), ......

And pray tell, why was it a well deserved genocide? The Phoenicians were respected by the GReeks and Romans as great traders, maritime adventurers and the only one of the ancients who traversed beyond hte pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar and Jabl al whatever on the other side inMorocco). ... The phoenician alphabet is the first phonetic alphabet in the world and the Greek alphabet is derived from the phoneician. How was it good to have slaughtered these wise ancients?

The Phoenician mother land was removed from Carthage by a few centuries just as America is removed from Britain.

The Phoenicians excelled at trade. The Carthagenians excelled at war.

Is was by sheer determination that Rome was not destroyed as a civilization during the Second Punic War. When you come that close to being destroyed yourself, you get a little less squeamish about listening to Cato the Elder when he would again repeat, "Cartago delenda est."

Yes , but if I use a little grecian formula for men, nobody notices =^)

Seriously though, I have seen other sources that places celtic parent culture as originating as far away as nepal or tibet. Whatever the truth may be , no one can debate that as an ethno linguistic group the celts sure do get around.

The article raises an interesting point: most people assume that languages spread by conquest, but that doesn't seem to hold so well. The Romans conquered the Greeks, but the Greeks still speak Greek and probably more Romans learned Greek than Greeks learned Latin. Likewise, the Gauls maintained their language for centuries after Caesar's conquest, but lost it after they successfully conquered back territory. The Germanic Franks conquered Romanized Gaul, but wound up speaking a language more Roman than German. 3 posted on 07/01/2003 8:58:08 AM EDT by wideawake

Culture plays a big part in The adoption of language. the normans invaded Ireland in the 10 and 11th centuries. rather than the irish becoming like the normans, the normans became "quo hiberniam ipso hibernes" e.g. more irish than the irish themselves. Any modern irish with the prefix "fitz" in their name can trace their lineage to the normans, as fitz comes from the latin speaking norman "fils" meaning "the son of"

Pick up a dictionary and sample the derivations. Latin is very heavily represented now. It's probably the single most common source of word roots although the core vocabulary of the language is Germanic.

Again that's true. The best way to really learn English is to learn Latin. Try learnign Sanskrit or Avestan, now those are polished languages!

The folks who lived there for the previous one thousand years were obviously culturally advanced over their attackers!

True. THe Hittite records int he years 1500 to 1200 BC talk of Mycenean pirates. SO the great heroes of the Illiad were nothign more than pirates and the battle itself was an extended pirate campaign against an establisehd city.

the Turks (who were, by that time, quite civilized themselves, or things would have been much, much worse)Quite correct, the Turks/Mongols were civilised quite a bit by that time (100 years after the butcher Timur e Lang)

Is was by sheer determination that Rome was not destroyed as a civilization during the Second Punic War. When you come that close to being destroyed yourself, you get a little less squeamish about listening to Cato the Elder when he would again repeat, "Cartago delenda est."

True, the Romans were gritty, but they were also helped by the fact that Hannibal's Celtic allies were really treacherous and the Romans' allies -- the Latins were not (after this and the Latin war the Romans gave citizenship to all the cities in the Latinum plain). Rome faced a true military genius in Hannibal and he was revered as such by the Romans for centuries after that.

Also, the Carthaginains were originally a colony of Tyre. But Tyre was destroyed by Alexander and the rest of the Phoenician towns came under GReek occupation. The phoenician trading links then passed to Carthage. The Carthaginians were traders who were attacked by outsiders -- they had to give up trading in the eastern Mediterranean to the GReeks and were left with the western Mediterranean and Britain. But the Romans wanted that as well, so war was inevitable. After the Punic wars the Romans went on to Epirus and defeated teh GReeks to become undisputed master of the Mediterranean, or as the Romans called it, 'Mare Nostrum' or Our Sea.

Seriously though, I have seen other sources that places celtic parent culture as originating as far away as nepal or tibet. Whatever the truth may be , no one can debate that as an ethno linguistic group the celts sure do get around.

Celtic culture was derived from the main Aryanic culture, but it developed in Europe. the langauge too developed in Europe. And the high points of Celtic culture came after the introduction of Christianity to Ireland. For the time from 400 AD to 1000 AD, IREland WAS the flower of civilisation. However, the Celts are not and were not a primarily racial group, more, as you point out a ethno-linguistic group.

The adoption of language. the normans invaded Ireland in the 10 and 11th centuries. rather than the irish becoming like the normans, the normans became "quo hiberniam ipso hibernes" e.g. more irish than the irish themselves

The higher culture does tend to win. Similarly the Mongols and Turks adopted Islamic culture in the West and Chinese in the East. and Indian in India (Moghul)

"For the time from 400 AD to 1000 AD, IREland WAS the flower of civilisation."

Very true. Have you Read Thomas Cahills "how the Irish saved civilization", the 2nd book in his "pillars of history" series?. It chronicles the role of the Irish as the guardians of western culture after the fall of the Roman empire. Very good read, and entertaining for such a weighty topic. I just checked and it's still in print.

I'm working on a novel's material involving 3-5 field researchers arguing with beer et al. over every side of every theory of these "out-of-Caucuses" migrations as the ice receded and drought rearranged tribes' lands and migrations.

Herodotus's People Eaters beyond the Blackrobes supplies my story's peoples northeast of the Sythians. I follow the "plaids" west from "China". The constant invasions churned the genetic pool as well as killing off countless tribes. I am using the Kurds some of whom look as Dutch as anyone in the Neatherlands.

I link tribe raiders with todays' sex slave trade; IMO, the market for very young blonds has always been as good as it is in today's islam heartland.

141
posted on 02/16/2004 2:05:19 PM PST
by SevenDaysInMay
(Federal judges and justices serve for periods of good behavior, not life. Article III sec. 1)

Linguists in the past have divided the Indo-European family of languages into two large sub-groups: the Centum Languages and the Satem Languages. These names come from the words used for "hundred" in each group, but the similarities are supposed based on many other factors as well.

The Italic, Germanic, Gallic, and Greek Languages, as well as Tocharian A and B are believed to be Centum languages, while the Balto-Slavic and Iranian Languages and Sanskrit are Satem Languages.

Some earlier Indo-European Languages like Hittie, don't fall into either group. Or so I was told in my College Classical Greek classes.

So? Charlemagne wasn't really French. He was a Frank. The Franks were Germanic tribesmen who invaded Roamn Gaul.

"THe early German barbarians wanted the riches of the Roman lands and conquered them."

I think that is an oversimplification. Some of the Germanic barbarians like the Visigoths, were trying to get protection within the Empire. Both the Visigoths and Ostrogoths as well as other Germanic tribes were hardly strangers to the benefits of Roman civilzation and culture. Suer, wealth was part of it, but there were other factors which impressed them about Roman society.

"They then realised that this was a superior culture they captured (like hte Romans capturing Greece said 'Captive Greece encaptivated Rome', but even more so) and became completely Roman."

I don't think the Barbarians were fools, nor were they ignorant of Roman culture even before they invaded the Empire. The "invasion" of Roame by the Barbarians was a lengthy process and was started by the Roamn practise of incoporating barbarians into their military estrablishment, first as auxiliaries, later as legionnaires and foederati.

The Roamns did not view their borders the same way that modern states view theirs. The Roman border was a line between Roman culture and non-Roamn culture, not a line limiting Roamn influence and power. The Romans formed alliances with tribes beyond their borders and Roman trde goods and merchants and ideas crossed into barbarian territory. The Romans were able to project their influence beyond their borders.

I think even referring to a barbarian "capture" of Roamn or the "Fall" of Rome is msileading. The barbarians gradually infiltrated Roman soceity and the Roman state. The Roman state gradully eroded and collapsed from within. The later major barbarian incursions were more like the actions of scavengers than predators.

"Rome did not become Germanicized as the Germans had nothign culturally to offer Rome."

Are you SURE Rome was not Germanicized? The trappings of Roamn government may have persisted for a time, but the reality of Germanic social realtionships gradually replaced them. The idea of a citizen owing allegience to a state wa gradully replaced by a Germanic concept of a warrior class owing allegience to a powerfiul warlord. The Latin Languages and peoples are the products of intermingling of Germanic and Roman origins.

"The Germans became Romanized whether within or without hte Empire."

Precisely. But I think there was also a Germanization of Roman territory. I don't think the Germans were culturally or socially destitute.

"Modern Western civilisation is nearly exclusively Roman with Christian morals."

To a degree. But I think that the Renaissance with its rebirth of interest in Rome and Greece is responsible for a lot of that. I don't think feudalism was a Roman concept.

I remember reading somewhere that there are words in Anglo-Saxon, which came into modern English from Latin words the Anglo-Saxons picked up before invading England. Other Latin words came from Norman French.

Some words in Latin, or properly the Italic Languages of which Latin is the best known, were similar due to having arisen from a common ancestral word. I think the term is "cognate". Others were adopted into Germanic languages as above. You can't look at modern German. You have to look at say, Anglo-Saxon or Gothic or Old Norse for a better picture of these cognate words. All languages change over time. Your observations about Polish, a Slavic Language, and Germanic/Italic/Celtic are correct. The latter trhee are closer "cousins" to each other than eithre is to a Slavic Language, but they all presumably arose from the same ancestor - Indo-European and so you can find cognate words in Celtic and Sanskrit.

I guess its sort of like looking at a tree. Indo-European was the base. It split into two main branches - the Centum Languages and the Satem Languages, with some odd branches like Hittite growing out at the base.

The Centum branch split into a Proto-Germanic branch, a proto-Celtic Branch, a proto-Greek branch and a proto-Italic branch. With time, this split further. But unlike a tree, each branch also picked up words from other branches it came into contact with. kind of confusing and interesting at the same time.

Some people now theorize it may have been northern Anatolia or even where the Black Sea now rests. They keep trying to locate an Indo-European homeland by looking at words for trees and animals which are common in all the languages and then looking at the ranges these plants and animals occupy in common.

I have heard of this but don't believe it myself. Personally, I can usually tell an Irishman or Scotsman from a Scandinavian without too much trouble, although there is overlap.

Germans come from the Latin word Germani which mean "brothers".

If you read Caesar's Gallic Wars, you will note Caesar's observation that the Gauls were different and distinct from the Germans. I think archeological evidence seems to indicate that the Celtic People were more civilized, that they lived in settled towns like the Roamsn themselves did. That they had a high culture and were skilled bronzesmiths and metalworkers and had fixed farmlands.

The Germans of Caesar's time on the other hand appear to have been more of a pastoral-hunting people with more limited skills.

Does this translate into something genetic? I don't know. Germanic Langauges are sufficiently distinct from Celtic Langauges to be accorded the same individuality as the Italic or Greek or Balto-Slavic recognition. And langauge differences may or may not reflect actual racial affinities. Ditto cultural ones.

At any rate, as far as the Roamsn were concerned, they appeared to have regarded them a distinct people and they were there and we were not.

Linguists in the past have divided the Indo-European family of languages into two large sub-groups: the Centum Languages and the Satem Languages. These names come from the words used for "hundred" in each group, but the similarities are supposed based on many other factors as well.

Thanks! I've read about the Centem and Satem bits before. So, maybe the geographical issues are correct -- viz. the Slavic languages did break off from the Irani-Indic languages later than German.But, I speak French, German and know Latin and Sanskrit and a bit of Polish (serious history buff) and it does seem to me like German and Sanskrit have more in common with each other than Polish. Of course I haven't studied Polish or other Slavic languages in depth, so can't really be sure.

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